A Passion for Pushing the Limits
Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.
Evolution biologist

. . . mind and external reality, being differentiated conceptually, are both 
merely ideas. From the end of the last century scientists have 
recognized this idealistic impediment in their work. Werner Heisenberg 
wrote: The common division of the world into subject and object, inner 
world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate and leads us 
into difficulties. Thus, even in science, the object of research is no 
longer nature itself but man's investigation of nature.

. . . The universe has arisen through objectification and the ball is placed 
in our hands. We have to practise letting it go if we are to play games 
with it instead of being its dependent. If, as we have assumed, science 
is practising a way of finding out, the science of creative intelligence is 
the natural and only thorough way of continuing the process. It does 
not supersede the objective research but irradiates and enlivens it.  

-- Max Flisher, in Science and Objectivity 

http://home.debitel.net/user/RMittelstaedt/Media/subj-obj.html

_____________________


Searching for understanding and consistency 

Almost from the time I rose up onto my two legs, I was free to explore my birth ecosystem -- the 
woodlands and fields of the Hudson River's shores -- as freely as any Indian in whose invisible footsteps I 
walked.  I climbed trees to see farther, crossed fences that said "no trespassing," came close to copperheads 
and bears, risked my life on thin ice -- always pushing the limits -- but was never hurt beyond a wasp sting 
due to my own carelessness and knew nature to be benign and friendly.  Nature and I had not been parted by 
theories of science or cultural categories, so I could, for example, take my mind up into any tree too high or 
difficult to climb and be with a woodpecker there in my seamless world even as my toes still squished 
deeply into the river mud in search of snail friends.  It was a delicious time of innocence and profound 
knowing of what we now call `Oneness' that shaped my life and brings pleasure in recalling.  More than
sixty years later, exploring my early childhood turf after attending my 50th high school reunion, I found 
myself weeping with joy to find so many of my childhood tree friends alive and well after such long 
absence. 

Perhaps my earliest introduction to living systems forged by humans was the weekly circuit of nearby 
farms my family made in my father's Model-T ford truck on Saturday or Sunday, bartering my mother's 
fruits and vegetables for eggs and chickens at one farm, milk at another, honey, cider and plums at a third 
and so on.  My two brothers and I would play Kick the Can with the kids on each farm, or jump and swing 
on ropes in hay barns and check in on the various animals while the grownups exchanged local news, 
calling us in for cake and whipped cream before leaving.  Most of our food -- all organically grown, if not 
so labeled -- was traded in this way, the farm families supporting one another. More formally scheduled 
activities were held at the local Grange, the hub of our rural social system half a century ago.  

As I grew old enough to think <i>about</i> my experiences, rather than simply live them, I investigated the 
insides of dead animals, pondered their lives and deaths, grew curious about how Nature worked and who we 
humans were in this scheme of things, where we had come from and where we were headed.  When I was 
ten years old in seventh grade, having skipped ahead in school during early years, a wonderful biology 
teacher with a Ph.D. in music and encouragement for my curiosity made me realize I was slated to study 
science.  My parents, however, perceived science as a subject for boys and steered me away from math and 
physics, into French, music and art, explaining that I had talent and needed to study art after high school.  
Earning a four-year full tuition, room and board university scholarship at fifteen, I entered Syracuse 
University at sixteen. There I could at least experience broader ideas than those of its Art School alone, but 
I did not formally study science until some years later, making my way into graduate school at Indiana 
University as a divorcee with a tow-year-old daughter. I made up my lack of the requisite background by 
passing some exams I crammed for and convincing a few professors I was capable of doing the advanced 
work in science.

By the time I got my Ph.D. and a post-doctoral fellowship in evolution biology at the AMNH (American 
Museum of Natural History), I had really come to believe in the western materialist scientific worldview, 
which was compatible with the materialist Marxist economics I had learned during a few intervening years 
in Berkeley, where my second child, a son, was born in the politically dramatic early Sixties. I had become 
an activist and lived out the mid Sixties in the safety of Canada, continuing to organize anti-war 
demonstrations there while my brother went to Vietnam and became a colonel in the Marines.  The 
considerable research I did in my concern with global political and economic issues contributed further to 
me growing understanding of planetwide human systems.   

Always I felt the need for coherence and consistency in my worldview.  It was important to me, for 
example, to integrate my scientific worldview with my Marxist understanding of economics. In the ensuing 
years I continued to explore new mental and physical territories, diving into new fields or areas of inquiry, 
even whole new cultures and languages, immersing myself in them with enthusiasm to see as quickly as 
possible how they looked from the inside, then re-emerging to compare and integrate them with my other 
life experiences -- plowing new territory, sowing, feeding, weeding and harvesting the fruits of my ever-
evolving worldview.    

Sometimes I literally plunged myself from morning sessions with professors in the hallowed ivy halls of 
MIT to evening sessions in prison with black inmates, or from dancing Reggae with the natives of a Costa 
Rican rainforest to having cocktails at the palace in the capitol next day, striving to see things from the 
most different perspectives.  I deliberately sought new perspectives, looking out for inconsistencies in my 
worldview and finding ways of eliminating or resolving them.  This has made for a very complex life that 
has often seemed highly inconsistent to my family and friends, and even to me like a cat's proverbial nine 
lives in one, but I was always true to the unreachable goals of the true explorer's path, to my soul's deep 
yearning for wholeness and meaning.  How could I act with integrity if I did not know How Things Are in 
the great scheme of things?

I never thought this unusual until I began to notice how often other people thought it so, and until I 
noticed how many people have inconsistent worldviews.  To me it is very strange that a fully committed 
materialist reductionist scientist can be equally committed to God on Sundays or that a concentration camp 
guard can torture his victims all day and bring flowers lovingly to his wife after work or that a culture can 
tell its children not to take things from each other and then aggress on the people of sovereign nations to 
exploit their resources.  

No one was talking about systems theory when I began to evolve my lifestyle, and even after I first learned 
about it almost half a century ago, I did not see its implications for such matters as worldviews or belief 
systems for a very long time; I did not know myself as a natural systems theorist and practitioner.  Within 
the sciences alone, I came to explore biology, physiology, psychology, physics, anthropology, sociology, 
medicine, foundations of logic and mathematics, ancient sciences such as the Vedic, Taoist and Incan, 
worldwide indigenous sciences and contemporary alternative sciences, not to mention philosophy of science, 
in order to arrive eventually at the rudiments of a comprehensive new scientific worldview of my own.[1]

In the animal behavior department on the top floor of the AMNH, while doing my post-doc in the late 
Sixties, I came to see my own and my colleagues' work as "trivia research" in a burning world.  Once 
again, I was looking for consistency. While I was doing comparative brain/behavior research, the museum's 
smokestacks were belching black soot all over upper Manhattan even as its pioneering exhibit on pollution, 
housed in an elaborate and expensive maze of elegant Japanese architecture erected within the great hall, was 
blaming pollution problems on people who littered. The exhibit, full of sanitized plastic garbage heaps and 
other evidence, actually ended with a picture of Pogo over a mirror, saying "The enemy is Us!" while a 
speaker admonished, "Don't drop that gum wrapper!"

I was livid and made myself unpopular by pointing out this contradiction and growing even more politically 
active.  It was a mystery to me how people could fail to understand the most basic economic relationships 
between wealth and poverty, cheap imported goods and the exploitation of foreign labor, corporate polluters 
and laws protecting them, etc.  Understanding the dire situation of humanity in a win/lose world ever deeper 
in crises of poverty and other social injustice, warfare, nuclear threat, pollution, desertification, etc., I 
became convinced that economics and politics were more likely to answer my big questions of who we 
humans were and where we were headed than science.  

While politics gave me some hope for understanding and improving the world, science did not.  It had 
revealed little other than that humans were large mammals with big brains that had come up through the 
ranks of Earth's creatures by Darwinian struggles for survival and were doomed to continue in endless 
competition and conflict by virtue of "human nature." This contradicted my childhood view of benign 
Nature and was no more inspiring than the broader scientific worldview of an accidental and meaningless 
universe running down to heat death by entropy.  While I could accept, at that time, a universe without 
"intention" or God, I felt deep down that evolution could not have had such splendid results if all nature 
were survival struggle amidst aggressive nastiness.

Ethology (the study of animal behavior) was all the rage at the time, with one author after another writing 
popular books to explain our human aggressions as our evolutionary animal heritage. None of them seemed 
to have noticed that intra-species aggression almost never leads to killing; that, on the other hand, other 
species were internally prevented from killing their kind by elaborate built-in rituals and limits that humans 
lacked.  This contradiction forced me to think and gave me an important insight: that our big brains, 
explosively sudden on an evolutionary timeline, apparently traded safe, inborn behavioral limits for risky 
freedom of choice on how to behave.  A corollary of this proposition was that humans alone require ethical 
guidelines and have to devise them culturally along with forms of governance. 

Beyond the limits of established science 

One of the most difficult limits of the official scientific worldview for me -- in addition to its exclusion of 
all human experience that cannot be measured by manmade instruments -- was the ban on values, the proud 
pronouncement of science as neutrally objective and therefore value-free.  I was fond of pointing out that 
this constituted a hypocritical abandonment of responsibility, since nothing in science except unused lab 
equipment and unused statistical tools actually <i>were</i> value-free.  Allowable scientific questions and research 
were determined by funding, and scientific funding in the Fifties and Sixties, when I was studying science, 
already came largely from the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower had named it in warning 
us against its power.  Obviously, the <i>values</i> of this complex determined what scientific efforts were useful 
enough to fund, yet scientists, isolated in their laboratories, failed to see science as a cultural endeavor in a 
cultural system, the values of which limited its freedom as much as its own worldview did. 

My natural bent toward holistic systems thinking got me into trouble again and again.  I was living in a 
culture that had separated and boxed up just about everything -- politics, economics, art, science, religion, 
ethics, work, play, black people, white people, rich, poor, you name it -- even economics and money were 
separated. Anyone trying to undo these carefully constructed separations was a troublemaker.  

Another difficult limit in science for me was the ban on <i>anthropomorphism.</i> This was the heresy of 
projecting human characteristics onto Nature or empathizing with Nature as alive, intelligent and feeling, 
the way I knew it to be from my childhood experience. Scientifically, Nature was to be perceived as separate 
and independent of all human thinking and feeling.  A dog, for example, had to be demonstrated to be 
conscious or intelligent by rigorous definitions of the terms and equally rigorous and measurable 
experimental testing, not because a human perceived it to be.  Otherwise objectivity -- the fundamental 
assumption that natural phenomena are independent of us and can therefore be studied without being affected 
by experimenters -- would be undermined.  

Philosophers of science, paying attention to the discoveries of physics, were already recognizing the 
impossibility of objectivity in an interconnected and participatory universe of energy patterns,[2] but 
objectivity is a lynchpin of the official scientific worldview, so its impossibility is still resisted despite 
actual research results ruling it out.[3]  Of course, while anthropomorphism was taboo, perceiving Nature as 
mechanics, which I came to call <i>mechanomorphism,</i> was mandatory.  Whenever I pointed out that since 
humans had invented machinery, <i>mechano</i>morphism was merely second-hand anthropomorphism, I got only 
dirty or pitying looks.

My training in science taught me love and respect for clear definitions and logical reasoning.  
Unfortunately, I eventually found the very foundations of western science and many of its conclusions to be 
based on faulty reasoning, as I will elaborate.  The good side of this was that it challenged me to work for 
years on a better foundation for science.  While politics and economics had come to seem better qualified to 
help me understand humanity and its future prospects than the science I was taught, I still believed in 
science at some deep level and gradually realized that its theory and practice could be and were being 
changed.

Meanwhile, the leftist political groups I affiliated with over the years had proven to suffer from in-house 
rivalries, hostilities and elitist practices, thus seeming to me ever more incapable of bringing about the 
better world they preached.  Leaving New York City for Boston in the early Seventies, I worked on 
scientific research at Mass General Hospital, but soon realized a normal scientific career was impossible for 
me with my growing doubts and the feeling of swimming upstream against an impossible tide when 
expressing them to colleagues. 

A position as Juvenile Justice Planner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts taught me that mainstream 
politics were even more corrupt than radical politics, and I came close to getting fired several times for 
standing on ethical principles.  While I taught a couple of courses at MIT and the University of 
Massachusetts around this time, without the formal appointments that would have locked me into their 
"publish or perish" tenure tracks, my fiercely independent spirit has kept me away from traditional 
universities altogether ever since.  I seemed to be a social misfit all around!   

In 1974, while on the Juvenile Justice Planner job, I had a unique opportunity to travel to China with nine 
other scientists through a political organization called Science for the People that had been invited to send a 
delegation as official guests of the National Science Association of the People's Republic.  This was a real 
adventure, as the US did not have official diplomatic relations with China yet.  We had to get visas through 
Canada and the Chinese authorities did not stamp our passports, to keep us out of trouble with our own 
authorities.  

Along with the ethology of human nature books of that time, other popular authors were bringing racism 
back into purportedly scientific studies of intelligence just when our political activity seemed to be ending 
racism. This pushed my thinking as well into questions of just what was intelligence.  I queried Chinese 
scientists for their views on intelligence and was told they had determined that motivation was a better 
indicator of aptitude than standardized intelligence tests, and had therefore abandoned them.  

It was only years later, when I adopted Arthur Koestler's concept of holons in holarchy -- natural entities 
embedded within each other, as, for example, the holarchies of cells/organs/organ systems/bodies, or 
species/ecosystems/planets/star systems/galaxies or individuals/families/communities/nations/world) -- that I 
came to my own definition of intelligence as measurable by the number of holarchic layers and the length 
of time one takes into account for their well-being or sustainability when making decisions.  The 
<i>Haudenosaunee</i> (called Iroquois by the white man), for example, took the well-being of families, 
communities and ecosystems over seven generations into account in their deliberations, which is something 
of an intelligence record in my book of cultures.  Because of this intelligence, they made peace among 
warring nations and devised a Great Law of Peace that became the basis for our own US Constitution, 
largely through the efforts of Benjamin Franklin.[4]

The Chinese had a definition of science that puzzled us westerners; they called science "the summation of 
the knowledge of the people" and said it "walked on two legs." These "legs" were the knowledge of ordinary 
people and the work of professional scientists.  We were there at the end of the Cultural Revolution, during 
which university buildings had been closed as professors, along with students, were sent to the countryside 
to learn from peasants.  From their perspective, universities were still alive and functioning under these new 
circumstances.  The Chinese were very open with us and fulfilled our request to meet with such professors 
on farms, where they told us of discoveries made by peasants, in crossing plants, for example, that were 
theoretically impossible.  Their job when they went back to their labs would be to show scientifically why 
they <i>had</i> been possible.  This began to explain the Chinese definition of science.  

Over a decade later, I asked an indigenous friend, Dr. Greg Cajete[5] of the Santa Clara Tewa pueblo in New 
Mexico, what he saw as the difference between <i>his</i> science and ours, given that he was trained in both.  He 
replied that the white man isolates pieces of Nature and takes them into the laboratory for study because his 
goal is to control them, while the red man goes into Nature to study then in context because his goal is to 
integrate with them.  

The Chinese authorities did not send professors into the countryside as punishment, but because they 
genuinely believed that poor peasants had rich scientific knowledge through their practical experience within 
Nature. This proved true and many ecologically sound techniques of natural pest control and soil 
management, for example, came out of this venture.  This was my first experience of recognizing 
"indigenous" science as valid, more on which later. 

China was rebuilding itself from the ground up without foreign capital investments -- a policy that paid off 
handsomely when China became a strong enough and attractive enough economy in its own right to be able 
to negotiate terms with foreign investors as equals.  This financial independence is an important 
development in our world that has not happened in most other underdeveloped countries since World War II.  

A third confirmation of the value of respecting people's practical scientific experiments and knowledge came 
for me from various articles in <i>The Ecologist</i> magazine, World Bank reports and many other sources 
showing that all over the world ordinary peasants and indigenous peoples had evolved sound scientific 
practices in agriculture that far outweighed our own modern knowledge.  While Green Revolution 
production figures deliberately distorted results in their favor, the truth was that production was higher and 
more sustainable in traditional systems.  In Bali and India, the World Bank's projects created such 
agricultural disasters they had to withdraw to let people go back to their old methods.

In the late Eighties I helped found the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network, in the process of which I 
learned as much science from indigenous people as I had in universities, and in the Nineties I lived in the 
Peruvian Andes for a year, confirming that the Incas had developed one of the most successful agricultural 
sciences in all the world, but that is getting ahead of my story.  

Back in Boston from China, an encounter with a very impressive psychic turned my quest for understanding 
quite suddenly down a totally different track.  Having left religion along with home at sixteen, when I began 
university, had made it easier to accept the scientific worldview without conflict, but now I was questioning 
both science and politics in my search for a larger, more meaningful worldview.  This psychic and new 
friends I met in her classes, plunged me into esoteric study, reading everything from the esoteric classics to 
modern accounts of out-of-body, after-death and reincarnation experiences, along with what was then called 
"paraphysics" -- attempts to explain all manner of "psychic phenomena" within the scientific worldview by 
stretching its limits.  

Thus my disappointment with science led me to its explorative fringes, where I continued to seek scientific 
explanations of the world and humanity within it among those who had broken out of the official taboos.  
The paraphysicists certainly had some interesting and even exciting theories.  One of them, Itzhak Bentov,[6]
whom I had the privilege to meet, had a very appealing wave theory of the universe as a giant toroidal 
black/white hole in continuous creation, the first such theory I encountered, having only a vague memory 
of hearing about Lord Kelvin's "smoke ring universe."  I now see such theories cropping up again and find 
them the most influential physics theories in my own evolving scientific model of a living universe.   

After considerable effort and repeated failure, I succeeded in having my own out-of-body experiences.  
Biofeedback devices, which I had first encountered in graduate school, were available for some informal 
research.  With their help I explained my OOBEs to myself in terms of alignment between the frequencies 
of the powerful mechanical aortic heartbeat waves and slow brain waves.  But this did not answer the 
question of whether I was really leaving my body behind through such physiological synchronies or 
whether they happened "only" in my mind, as a state of consciousness induced by those physiological 
events, as mainstream science would insist.  

I wrestled with this enigma for years before realizing, one day, that <i>all</i> my experience is limited to what my 
consciousness can perceive, and therefore is <i>within</i> my consciousness, as <i>all</i> experience of <i>all</i> humans is!  It 
took this dive into esoteric experience and years of contemplation of it to understand that through it I had 
made a hugely important observation with major implications for scientific modeling of our universe, as I 
will describe later. 

Over the years, I have had quite a few "anomalous" experiences I would have repressed or ignored had I not 
expanded my worldview into the esoteric beyond the limits of science.  Just as an example, twice in my life 
I have read a published piece of literature that had not yet been put into print.  One was a book by marine 
biologist and epigrapher Barry Fell,[7] put into my hands by a childhood friend who had become a geologist.  
He gave it to me on the only visit I ever paid to his home as an adult, while I was pregnant with my son, 
so the year is not mistakable.  Only many years later when I no longer had that particular copy of the book 
did I have the wonderful opportunity to meet Barry Fell personally and discover that this book had never 
been published until over a decade after I read it.  The same happened with James Lovelock's first journal 
article on Gaia, which was put into my hands during my post-doc at the AMNH, therefore in early 1971 at 
the latest, though it later proved -- again, on meeting the author -- to have been published for the first time 
only in 1972.[8]  Such anomalous personal experiences were instrumental in forcing me to change my 
worldview to accommodate them, so they could become unusual, yet normal events.

The most fun I had with science during my Boston years was when I was hired by WGBH-TV to write 
educational materials for the NOVA/HORIZON series. Discovering that I already knew something about the 
field of expertise behind every program topic, I realized how broad my interests were, how many areas I had 
explored and how great my need was for a worldview that made sense of <i>all</i> human experience.  

A separate WGBH assignment was writing a book to go with a proposed film on public education for 
physically and mentally challenged youth. I set out across the US to interview the best teachers in this field 
and had the great privilege of meeting profoundly handicapped people who impressed me as highly evolved 
souls.  I was also amazed to discover that even deeply challenged students tended to achieve whatever their 
teachers believed they could achieve.  It might have been difficult for me to understand this had it not been 
so consistent with a worldview I was resonating with strongly in the then new and fascinating "Seth books" 
by Jane Roberts, published in the Seventies and into the Eighties, still being reprinted today.[9]

Seth, a discarnate entity dictating about a dozen books through Jane, title by title and sentence by sentence 
as her husband Rob wrote them down over the years, taught a consciousness-based universe, introducing the 
concept of humans creating reality from beliefs, both individually and as cultures.  It was the broadest, most 
coherent, internally consistent and intellectually satisfying worldview I had encountered, yet classed as 
esoteric literature because of its unusual origins.  Seth spoke eloquently on cosmic physics, chemistry, 
psychology, biology, medicine, sociology, evolution, human history, religion, philosophy, politics, art 
and other subjects.  Many later channelers seemed highly influenced by Jane's material, but, for me, none 
could add anything to it.  Jane, who, as a poet and novelist, had little knowledge herself of any of these 
fields, did not call her own dictations channeling and in Seth's voice consistently urged people to doubt the 
material and think things through on their own.

In a recent symposium of leading edge Ph.D. scientists, I found the courage to ask how many were familiar 
with the Seth books and more than half raised their hands. All of Jane Roberts papers are archived at Yale 
University and are still much visited there by people from all over the world. As I write this chapter I am 
scheduled to speak once more at an annual regional Seth conference (the Rocky Mountain Seth Conference).  
When the mechanistic worldview has been honored and laid to rest at last, I believe its successor will owe 
more than ever acknowledged to the mysterious Jane Roberts/Seth alliance.

Midlife Retirement

In retrospect, one of the best decisions I have made in my life was to take a "midlife retirement" in Greece, 
that turned out to last from the end of the Seventies, when my children had grown up, to the beginning of 
the Nineties, when I returned with a book published in New York and a new fledgling career in 
development.   

As a dear friend and MIT colleague said on my return, "How dare you take off for a thirteen year holiday in 
the Greek Islands and come back ahead of those of us who kept our noses to the academic grindstone?!"  I 
had certainly not intended that, but I came to accept that he was right and that it had happened precisely 
because I did <i>not</i> stay in academia, with all its categorizing and separation of "disciplines" and constraints 
on free thinking.  Without those limits I was able eventually to write my own evolving story of a living 
Cosmos in which the Earth is an evolving living entity and human history a coherent pattern of 
development within its living context.    

There were so many benefits of that retirement period leading up to writing that book that it is difficult to 
describe them.  I went to Greece with the intention of staying only two years or so, though I sold my house 
to do it, writing novels to explain the human condition to myself.  This was partly because I felt science 
had failed me in my search and partly because I was greatly inspired by having met and spent time with 
Henry Miller, whose great love of Greece and marvelous philosophy are wonderfully expressed in his book 
<i>The Colossus of Maroussi.</i>  It is also the case that it had not crossed my mind that I <i>could</i> pursue science 
on Greek islands, though, in the end, Greece gave me back, in fullest measure, my original motivation for 
pursuing science along with the leisurely opportunity I needed to evolve my own version of evolution 
biology and its relevance to humanity at present. 

Greece felt very quickly like home and looked very much like all of Earth to me, with its three-fourths sea 
and one-fourth pinkish-beige pieces of land and island. I called it <i>MidEarth,</i> literally the name of the 
Mediterranean Sea, because it was culturally and geographically a link between East and West as well as 
between North and South.  During my first few weeks there, before I even settled down, two anomalous 
experiences proved the magical nature of this land.

The first happened in Epidaurus on my first visit by boat and a Greek bus that dropped me some five 
kilometers from the gate in early morning mists lifting from fields of blood-red poppies beneath olive trees 
as far as I could see.  I cried with joy at their beauty, thrilled to be the first to arrive that day at the great 
ancient theater with its magnificent acoustics.  A few years later, I would be among the twenty thousand 
people it held to watch Eirini Papa (Irene Papas to Hollywood) perform Greek drama there under a full 
moon, dressed in black robes, greeted after the play by Melina Mercouri, just appointed minister of culture, 
stepping off a helicopter in a gold lam&#233; pant suit to rush out on stage.  

But this day I was alone in the vast theatre and amazed how the sun-whitened bare bones ruins of temples 
and hotels could still reveal the original splendor of the grand healing spa this was, with its colorfully 
painted buildings adorned with stone friezes of lions and flowers, fountains, statues and chariot race tracks, 
the gayety of comedy played alongside tragedy in deep psychological lessons about the actions of gods and 
mortals in a layered universe where everything affected everything else. The Greeks were naturally systemic 
thinkers.

Preparing to continue from there by bus to Nauplion, my next stop on this three-day tour, I went to the 
government pavilion near the theatre intending to cash a travelers check, only to find there was no place to 
do that, no way at all to get any cash.  Banks had not been open before I left my island, and I had only a 
few coins in my pocket, not nearly enough for the Nauplion bus.  I was completely stymied by this 
unforeseen dilemma, having no way to go on, nowhere to sleep, and, with nothing else to do,  spent my 
last coins on a Greek brandy.  As I sipped it, an agitated waiter suddenly ran up to me, grabbed my arm and 
pulled me from my chair.  I had no idea what I had done to offend him and get myself thrown out.  He 
dragged me to the door and pointed into the road, as though to yell "Get lost!" at me, when I saw it -- a bank 
on wheels had pulled up!  A vehicle like an old RV with a side door and a clerk inside, who cashed my 
travelers check.  I stepped off dazed by the cash in my hands and watched it pull away again without 
attracting the attention of anyone else.  The waiter still looked shocked himself as I regained the presence to 
thank Hermes the Trickster, the god of travels, for this magical good fortune. In all my years in Greece, I 
never saw such a "bank" again!  I also thought of Seth, who taught that we manifest our realities . . . 

The second anomalous incident happened within a few weeks later on the Greek island of Kos, considered 
the birthplace of the twins Apollo and Aphrodite.  Kos is tiny and there were only a handful of day-trip 
tourists among the ruins as there were no hotels on the island.  Walking across a flat field of sand with a 
friend, I was picking up various seedpods and small shells in spiral form, marveling at how many versions 
there could be of this elementary form, which was to become so important in my model of the universe.  
My reverie took me deep into a cosmos of wheeling galaxies when suddenly the sand some twenty yards 
from us whirled up into the air forming a perfect funnel that swept a graceful curve in our direction and 
smacked right into us. 

As the day was otherwise completely calm, without so much as a breeze, my friend, getting the connection, 
asked in amazement "How did you <i>do</i> that?" I replied, "I didn't!" and then, on further reflection, added, "But I 
may have attracted it."  He looked at me strangely and asked, "Does the motion in a vortex go inward or 
outward?" Without having thought about it for a moment, I shot back "Both ways!"  I knew this with a 
certainty -- that it <i>had</i> to be centripetal and centrifugal at once.  Never having taken a single physics course, 
I could not explain it; I simply knew it as it surfaced in my consciousness then and there on the island of 
the Twins. I was really sure now that the vortex was the real key to how the universe worked, though it 
took much longer to figure out how.

I mention these two incidents, as I did the matter of reading things before they were in print, because they 
were such startling clues that reality was far more malleable than materialist science had taught me it was, 
and that it was very powerfully linked to my own consciousness.  It was one thing to find the Seth books 
intellectually appealing; it was quite another to have their concepts confirmed so dramatically that they 
became undeniable.

Mostly, after that, I lived in Greece very simply and less eventfully, in a small old stone house with 
relatively few possessions.  I fixed up the house, gathered fuel wood with a borrowed donkey, washed 
clothes by hand, went fishing, carried water from wells, cooked more simply, took long walks alone 
gathering wild greens and mushrooms along the way by day, thrilling to bright moon and stars by night, 
generally appreciating a very close relationship with my natural setting and enjoying Greek social life with 
its music and fellowship. 

In Greece I learned to undo the nagging Puritan ethic that something useful had to be done every minute of 
the day.  It was difficult for me to learn the fine Greek art of sitting and doing nothing but pass the time.  I 
was often bored, impatient, guilty and amazed at how much time Greeks could "waste".  While I had learned 
to consider time a precious and limited commodity, they saw time as abundant and unlimited.  After a few 
years and lots of practice, I was actually able to spend hours in thought without guilt. I learned that good 
thinking and writing take time to incubate.  Most important, I discovered the real value of letting my mind 
empty so new thoughts could appear in it.

This came most easily at sea for days and nights on end with fishermen.  At first I spent all my time aboard 
the fishing <i>kaiki,</i> which I had bought as an investment, reading whenever I wasn't helping or preparing 
food.  Gradually I discovered that inspiration comes best when the mind is completely lulled by the rocking 
waves, at peace with the endless sea and sky.  Sometimes at night, when the fishermen slept soundly as 
cats dropped about the deck, I could find no comfortable position on the hard planks. I would sit up, 
surrounded by pitch-black sky and sea with no demarcation between them and contemplate my place 
between the stars and the bioluminescent plankton in the dark waters.  Aware of the tremendous difference 
in their sizes, though they looked so much the same, I knew I was half way between the macrocosm and the 
microcosm.  I will say more about this unique cosmic position when describing the scientific model of a 
living universe I am presently developing (see last section). 

These experiences seemed mystical and led to writing poetry and philosophizing essays in addition to my 
novels.  I did write three novels before I went back to scientific pursuits, committing two of them to flames 
before returning to the US.  They were a great way to undo the elitist scientific language -- some would call 
it jargon -- I had learned in graduate school.  

As I lived among simple rural Greek farmers and fishermen, none of whom had more than a few year's 
schooling or spoke any English, I had lost all my identity as a professional scientist and could not even 
describe myself as a novelist.  My neighbors were clearly puzzled about all the books in my little rented 
stone house, never having seen any books except in school as children.  My linguistic expression, given 
the difficulties of the Greek language, was that of a toddler first learning to speak, only very gradually being 
able to share the simplest possible stories of my life and ideas.  This also contributed to turning my 
English writings into simpler story-telling form in good ancient Greek tradition!  

Back in the US in the Nineties, Paul Ray identified and interviewed me as a Cultural Creative,[10] calling my 
Greek years a shamanic journey into the underworld.  At first shocked by this interpretation, I came to see 
its validity.  I had stripped myself first of occupation, house and possessions to make the journey to Greece, 
then stripped myself of identity through lack of language, all typical of a shamanic rebirth or recreation of 
self.  

One of the greatest lessons I learned in Greece was about cultural assumptions.  I was aware of the literature 
on anthropology that advocated dropping all cultural assumptions and definitions when trying to understand 
a new culture and was determined to do that as I integrated myself into Greek island life.  I had no idea, 
however, how difficult a task that was, even with the best intentions.  Ten years into the process I was still 
uncovering my most ordinary assumptions.  For example, I assumed all people had the same definition of a 
"problem" as something amiss to be solved, only to discover after many misunderstandings and cultural 
blunders that something amiss may be a problem but is <i>not</i> necessarily perceived as something to be 
solved.  One result of this difference is that Greeks do not run for pain-killers when in pain, nor to 
therapists if they are not happy.  Their entire outlook on and expectation of life is profoundly different from 
ours by virtue of this one different definition!  On the whole, I found Greeks to be a happier people because 
they were always surprised by life's joys rather than obsessively worrying about what was wrong with them 
if they had problems and/or were not happy.

From the time I arrived in Greece, I would fling my arms out to the mysterious heavens at night crying 
"Use Me!" as a kind of non-religious prayer to Whatever might hear it.  One day, still effectively a novelist 
and essayist, I was walking among wild cyclamen in the lovely pine forested hills of my small island when 
a walking stick insect fell out of a tree and onto my sleeve.  Tears welled up in my eyes as I welcomed this 
utterly unexpected guest reminder of my childhood, when I had gathered up and played with many a walking 
stick.  I had not seen one since.  Instantly I knew that I still wanted to understand Nature scientifically and 
decided to write a book for small children telling the story of Earth's evolution.  It was not that I suddenly 
wanted to become a children's book author, but because I felt that one had to be very true with children and 
that this would give me the opportunity to tell the story as clearly and simply as possible.

Return to science and home  

I searched for relevant information in the few books I had brought with me after giving most of my library 
away and began writing to publishers and universities, begging for articles from scientists whose addresses I 
was creating from bibliographies.  I wanted such up-to-date information that no Athens library would have 
been worth the boat rides required to get to them, but it turned out that my Greek stamps attracted attention 
and articles actually began and continued to arrive for me at the local post office.  The book went from an 
edition for five-year-olds to one for ten to fifteen-year-olds and eventually into what I still see as my 
"grownup book."  The first version was the most difficult, as no one I could find had put the Earth's story 
into a coherent scientific sequence. Even Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who deeply influenced me with 
their Gaia Hypothesis[11] -- the most holistic analysis of Earth's evolution available -- had not done this, as 
Lynn was focused just on bacterial origins and Jim had been describing how the Gaian planetary system of 
life and non-life interacted at present. 

I sent the young people's version of the book to Lovelock in England and to Margulis in Boston for 
review. Both answered with very kind praise and while I was working on the adult version -- easier, having 
the basic story done, to fill in details from the scientific work I was receiving -- Jim Lovelock actually came 
to visit me on my island for over a week.  Soon after, by now the late Eighties, I was invited to three 
annual Gaia Conferences organized in England by Edward (Teddy) Goldsmith, founder/editor of <i>The 
Ecologist</i> magazine mentioned earlier.  This gave me connections back into a scientific community making 
real progress toward a more holistic understanding of Earth.

Jim Lovelock became a paragon for me because he was proving that universities, laboratories and grants 
were not necessary to doing good science.  In his countryside kitchen, on a very modest household budget, 
he had made his own lab equipment, inventing and engineering the Nuclear Capture Device that soon 
became extremely important to environmental science and medicine, then hitch-hiked all the way to 
Antarctica on a research vessel to take ocean measurements over a large portion of Earth to back up his 
planetary scientific hypothesis!  Somehow this validated my own pursuit of science on my small remote 
island.

The first time I visited Jim in Cornwall, he gave me a small paperback book that was inscribed to him with 
the words "<i>Closet Gaia, love, Lynn.</i>"  The book was about the work of the Russian geologist Vladimir 
Vernadsky,[12] who had seen life as a "transform of rock" -- as slow geological activity transforming itself 
into more rapid metabolic activity.  I shouted the proverbial Greek <i>Eurika!</i> at reading this, for Vernadsky 
gave me the seamless world of geobiology.  

The Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, working at MIT and the University of 
Paris respectively, gave me their new definition of life as <i>Autopoiesis</i> -- literally Greek for self-creation.  If 
living systems were autopoietic, creating themselves continually, then mechanical systems, I reasoned, 
should be called <i>allopoietic,</i> meaning "other created," because they require external inventors.  This 
distinction contributed a great deal to many essays that developed my thinking and led to my seeing 
whirlpools, proto-galaxies, galaxies, whirling atoms and particles, all as self-organizing, form-maintaining 
living entities along with the Earth that ever created itself anew from the same materials in cycles of 
magma to crust to magma, water vapor to rain to rivers to oceans to water vapor, soil to creatures to soil, 
etc.   Erich Jantsch's work on the self-organizing universe[13] fit my developing thought beautifully and 
many other scientists filled in many other pieces over time.

My own book, now called EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, begins with words written 
on the Greek Island of <i>Angistri</i> where I wrote its original version: 

<i>
This book is a work of philosophy in the original sense of a search for wisdom, for 
practical guidance in human affairs through understanding the natural order of the cosmos 
to which we belong. It bears little resemblance to what we have come to call philosophy 
since that effort was separated from natural science and became more an intellectual 
exercise in understanding than a practical guide for living.
</i>

So steeped was I in Greek culture I did not mention that <i>philosophia</i> was actually the ancient Greek word 
for the later Latin <i>scientia.</i>  Philosophy was natural science, the study of Nature, while <i>physis</i> -- the Greek 
word for nature itself -- was taken to designate what European scientists so much later came to see as the 
fundamental science of nature: physics.   Though I knew nothing of ancient Greek science in my youth, my 
big questions of who we were, where we came from and where we were headed drove me to science in search 
of wisdom to guide humanity on our path into the future.  Because I was disappointed in this quest, I 
determined to answer these questions for myself, within the expanding scientific framework I was now 
developing.  

To develop a new scientific model or worldview as a framework for the human journey, I had to think of the 
whole universe, Earth within it and humanity within the Earth as a coherent living system with system 
dynamics.  It was not a formal study of system dynamics that inspired me, since this field was still new, 
but my own mental exercises in thinking holistically and systemically, far away from the academic culture 
that had separated scientific disciplines into ever smaller fragments and whose professors did not exactly 
encourage minds questioning the most basic assumptions on which their careers had been built.  

Yet as soon as I abandoned novels to weave my scientific story, anonymous but powerful academic 
authorities started looking over my shoulders again to see just what it was that I was writing and whether I 
was inserting the proper footnotes.  I did not get rid of them until the day my son, who had come to live in 
Greece himself, said to me, "I hope you'll stand on the courage of your convictions, Mom, and not fill your 
book with footnotes nobody wants to read.  Just tell your story!"   

I pondered the story of western science again and again -- of modern physics born of European scientists' 
love of mechanics, which gave us a lifeless universe modeled on machinery.  Was this fundamental 
assumption of a lifeless, mechanical universe really a "self-evident truth" as scientific assumptions are 
supposed to be?  Descartes, the leading architect of the scientific worldview expounded in graduate schools 
to this day, came close to a consciousness-based science, rather than one of material mechanism, in the 
famous meditation leading him to pronounce <i>Cogito ergo sum,</i> "I think therefore I am."  But in his great 
love for the practical translations of math into machinery, he chose instead to separate mind from matter, 
naming God "the Grand Engineer" who put a piece of God-mind into his favorite engineered robot, so that 
man, too, could think and invent machinery that would eventually be as complex and lifelike as God's!  It 
seemed to me this was God in the image of man, rather than the other way around!

In my own words, Descartes had made nature allopoietic, with only man as autopoietic by the grace of God.  
(Woman was pure robot like other animals in his scheme of things.)  True to Greek myth, if not to Greek 
science, God the father was overthrown by his obstreperous, if inventive, human sons, who determined that 
their fine minds were not God-given after all, but had arisen, like their bodies, from a long series of 
fortuitous local accidents within an accidental universe.  It <i>had</i> to be accidental to explain it without a 
purposeful inventor, without purpose of any kind!  <i>This</i> new version of the universe had miraculously 
exploded out of nothing and, despite the staggering amount of impressive natural machinery, including man 
himself, that it gave rise to on its meaningless journey, was headed back into nothingness by the great Law 
of Entropy. 

While Descartes had understood that there can be no machine without a conscious and intelligent inventor, 
his followers eventually explained away the magic of life emerging from non-life, consciousness from non-
consciousness and intelligence from non-intelligence by coupling non-equilibrium thermodynamics with 
random accident, as, for example, in Ilya Prigogine's work.[14]  But, it seemed to me, this foundation for 
science was utterly illogical!  Machines, by definition, are purposive devices invented by intelligent beings 
and assembled from parts to carry out specific tasks.  They do <i>not</i> "arise" by accidental particle or atomic 
collisions, and no saying they did can make it so.  If nature is mechanism, logically it <i>must</i> have an 
inventor as Descartes proposed; if there is no inventor, it cannot be machinery.  

Nevertheless, historically the materialist reductionist science of celestial and biological mechanics had 
practical applications in engineering, so while it was anathema to the Church, which had been ruling 
European society through the allegiance of governing royalty and was not happy with scientific rejection of 
God, science was extremely appealing to a rising European bourgeoisie building an industrial revolution.  
Thus science gained the power to spread its materialist worldview throughout society and was eventually 
elevated to a kind of secular priesthood in its own right.  Within its ranks, theoretical physicists are an elite 
that appears to have special dispensation for proposing very far-out theories of How Things Are.  
Biologists, however, have been second-level scientists, subject to the "established" laws of physics to the 
point where life's amazing capacities for generating ever new creatures and ecosystems had to be defined as 
<i>negentropy,</i> a temporary swimming upstream that could increase order locally within the drearily 
deteriorating universe's entropic process toward heat death. 

Negentropy is credited with the descent of man, according to Darwin, his predecessors and his followers, as 
the natural creature of an evolutionary process of accidental events and survival struggles over billions of 
years.  This story of biological evolution has become virtually axiomatic in the scientific worldview, 
though its recognition of man as this kind of evolved creature has had questionable social benefits, 
justifying the exploitation of fellow humans, often cruelly, along with the rest of the natural world, which 
is now suffering a degree of devastation that threatens even human survival. The lack of moral 
accountability of science for social interpretations of Darwinism, along with its failure to see the grave 
inadequacy of the Darwinian hypothesis, has led to social ills from chaining children to machines for the 
sake of profits to the Holocaust and, even now, to the current tyranny of the quarterly bottom line 
competition that pushes large corporations to dishonest accounting and to exploiting the cheapest possible 
third-world labor under inhuman conditions.  The entrenched neo-Darwinian belief that man is doomed to 
perpetually hostile competition -- the scientific belief underlying these social ills -- is, as I will attempt to 
show, a serious misinterpretation of the evolutionary record. 

The definition of autopoiesis as life led me quickly to see that the universe could be described more 
elegantly and logically as self-creating living systems, from tiny living particle and atom vortices to the 
greatest of galactic vortices and the entire universe itself.  To be continually self-creating, vortices had to 
have a medium to feed on or be self-contained in the form of toroids, as in Lord Kelvin's smoke-ring 
universe, quite popular with physicists until Einstein stole away their attention.  When I got back to the 
US, I discussed this with physicist Hal Puthoff, a pioneer in zero-point energy (ZPE) research[15] and he 
thought it entirely plausible since atoms indeed feed off ZPE to maintain themselves.  Another colleague, 
Foster Gamble, is currently developing a detailed model of atoms as clusters of vortices.  

I pondered the question:  What if Galileo had looked down through the new lenses of his day arranged into a 
microscope, so he could see into a drop of pond water teeming with gyrating life forms instead of up 
through a telescope into the heavens, already conceived in his time as celestial mechanics?  Might biology, 
rather than physics, have become the leading science into whose models all others must fit themselves?  
Might scientists then have seen life not as a rare temporary and accidental occurrence within the inevitably 
destructive tide of entropy, but as the fundamental nature of an exuberantly creative universe?
 
Instead of projecting a universe of mechanism without inventor, assembling blindly through collisions of 
particles, then atoms and molecules, until a few such aggregates came magically to life and further evolved 
by accidental mutations, I proposed that there is reason to see the whole universe as alive, self-organizing at 
multiple fractal levels of living complexity -- as reflexive systems learning to play with possibilities in the 
intelligent co-creation of complex evolving systems. 

It seemed more reasonable to project our life onto the entire universe than our non-living machinery, which 
is a derivative extension of human capability and therefore a truly <i>emerging</i> phenomenon, rather than a 
fundamental one.  I found it possible to create a coherent scientific model of a living universe, a model that 
is not only justified by the findings of science, but can lead to the wisdom required to build a better human 
life on and for our planet Earth as the ancient Greeks intuited it should. 

Reentry and continuing adventure

Before I left Greece, I organized a large Earth Celebration event in Athens that was covered by MTV, my 
book was published in New York and I got invitations to speak in England, Scotland, The Soviet Union, 
the US and Costa Rica.  Jim Lovelock had sent me a used computer to replace my trusty old typewriter and 
although the Internet had not yet reached the Greek islands, I had moved to Hydra, which had a lawyer's 
office where I could send and receive faxes. 

The conclusion I had reached in the book was that we humans will have to learn very quickly to organize 
ourselves by the principles of living systems within the larger living system of our planet or do ourselves 
in as a species.  It became obvious to me that indigenous cultures know far more about this than western 
industrial culture does, so I set out to learn from them, soon getting involved in forming the Worldwide 
Indigenous Science Network, with meetings in Mexico, Calgary, Canada and Taos, New Mexico. 

I began to feel South America calling to me.  Alan Ereira's BBC film on the Kogi Indians of Columbia, 
<i>Message from the Heart of the World: the Elder Brother Speaks,</i> had a profound effect on me when I saw it 
in Greece so I looked up Alan in London, and soon had an invitation to visit the Kogi with a friend in New 
York who knew them as well. Though I did not go, I soon responded to my dearest oldest friend's invitation 
to come live with her in Tucson, Arizona while I worked on reentry.  The year was 1991.

Reentry shock! It was much harder than I'd anticipated, much harder than had been the entry into Greek 
culture. I felt like the proverbial fish out of water -- sometimes literally in my hunger for the sea.  From 
Tucson I visited Hopiland to continue work I'd begun with Hopi elders, especially Thomas Banyacya, to 
help him tell the Hopi Prophecy in the U.N. General Assembly after the 43-year effort to do so made by the 
Hopi and their many helpers.  In 1992, I was unexpectedly asked by the UN in Geneva to participate in an 
international congress on indigenous peoples in Chile as an advisor, just before the big "Rio `92" UN 
meeting on the environment, where I had been asked to be a "Wisdom Keeper" in the company of many 
wonderful religious and indigenous people.  Since I had no job or income, these invitations seemed a 
magical answer to the call of South America I was feeling so strongly.  I then moved to Washington DC 
on an inner call, where I got involved with hosting an annual Native Prayer Vigil between the Washington 
Monument and the White House that still happens each October. 

In Washington, I woke suddenly one morning in 1994, having heard a voice that said "Go to the June 
solstice festival in Peru with Mazatl!" No visual images, just that voice. Mazatl is Aztec, a sacred musician 
and artist.  Tracking him, I discovered that six other people had had the same dream call, as had Mazatl 
himself, who cancelled a concert with Peter Gabriel to take us!  Two days later a check big enough for the 
trip showed up in my mail -- a small grant I'd applied for and never heard about -- and I spent it all to go 
without a moment's hesitation. 

Just before this trip, I went to Ireland to speak at the International Transpersonal Association meetings in 
Killarney.  The preceding year I had met the crew of Roger Payne's whale-watching yacht in Key West, 
Florida, while visiting a friend there, and had tried to recruit enough paid passengers for a Galapagos cruise 
in hopes of gaining my own free passage.  After failing miserably despite the strong intention I held for 
that to happen, a man who heard my talk in Ireland came up to me afterwards and invited me to teach 
biology seminars while following whales a year later, aboard the ocean-going, whale-watching sailboat of 
his California-based marine biology research institute!

Again, intention had produced results, if form an unanticipated direction. Again and again I have been 
shown that this is the essence of what we call magic: the paradoxical focus of desire or intent while at the 
same time letting go of the outcome. It isn't easy to desire and let go of the desire simultaneously, but 
when we achieve it, it works!  

The colorful crowds of the June solstice festival in Cusco, Peru (winter there, with crisp bright sunny 
days), awesome Machu Picchu, the splendor of Lake Titicaca, pre-Incan Tihuanaco in Bolivia were all new 
wonders for me.  While walking a street in Cusco one day shortly before we left, the inner voice spoke once 
again, telling me to come back there in the fall for at least six months.  I was very reluctant, as it would be 
the rainy season and I knew almost no one, did not speak any Spanish and did not want to start over that 
way in yet another culture, however attractive it was.  I fought the relentless inner call for twenty-four 
hours, then succumbed and announced my plan to return. Needless to say, the money to do so showed up, 
and permitted me to stay there almost a year on what would have been gone in a few months in 
Washington. 

While there I had a unique opportunity to make a difficult trek with indigenous friends over a 5,000 meter 
(16,250 ft) high snow-covered pass to visit a traditional Andean community never yet visited by even an 
anthropologist.[16]  I had made almost only indigenous Quechua friends in Cusco, learned Spanish, 
investigated Inca history and started an indigenous coalition devoted to restoring Inca agriculture -- possibly 
the finest and most extensive agricultural experimentation and development in the history of the world -- as 
well as to reviving traditional medical knowledge, music, weaving, storytelling and other aspects of Inca 
culture.

I was also informally adopted by a fourteen-year-old medicine priest in training named Puma, who 
introduced me to his marvelous grandfather teacher and all his family.  By the following year, I had Puma 
lecturing and teaching workshops in the US, where he became very active in leadership youth groups 
devoted to ecology and indigenous wisdom.  As I write this he is 23 and just completing his training, 
which began at age three with dream teachers and continued from age six, when he was struck by 
lightning -- an Andean sign of a medicine man -- and his grandfather took over his training.

All of these and other experiences in indigenous worlds contributed enormously to my understanding of 
humans in nature, of interspecies communications, of the deep spiritual consciousness of all nature, of the 
awesome scientific knowledge indigenous people gained all over the world.  They also gave me my own 
spirituality in ways I like to think of fondly of as "reverse missionizing," though it was never, ever pushed 
on me.  Rather, it happened naturally, because their spirituality, undivided from the rest of their lives, was 
so reminiscent of my childhood experiences in nature.  

Not long after I returned from Peru and resettled in California, where I had taught the whale-watch biology 
seminars for one delicious summer, that wonderful Renaissance man, Willis Harman, then president of the 
Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by moon-walking astronaut Edgar Mitchell, asked me to write a book 
with him on how biology and society would change if we acknowledged consciousness as the source of 
material evolution rather than its late emergent product.  I was delighted by the opportunity to formalize 
this worldview, which I had come to but not stated publicly, and the book, <i>Biology Revisioned</i>,[17] was 
written as a dialogue between us, continuing, in a sense, the dialogues we had had by fax during my last 
years in Greece. 

I had also republished the book written in Greece as <i>EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution,</i> which 
introduced not only the concept of holons in holarchy (mentioned earlier) but a very important and basic 
cycle of evolution from individuation through tension and conflicts to negotiations and collaborative 
schemes leading to higher biological unity, exemplified in the evolution of the nucleated cell dominating 
the second half of Earth's evolution as a collaborative enterprise of previously hostile archebacteria, which 
dominated the first half.  This species maturation cycle links the well-known Type I and Type III 
ecosystems -- the first made of young aggressive species, the latter of mature cooperative species -- to show 
their underlying progression.  In an article called "The Biology of Globalization",[18] I extended this analysis 
of the evolutionary cycle to describing the human process of globalization.  Because Darwin did not see 
beyond endless hostilities over survival in nature, the emergence of this pattern of maturation to the less 
visible but profoundly cooperative schemes of mature ecosystems such as coral reefs, prairies and rainforests 
is very relevant for our own species, now being called to such maturity.  It is simply not the case that we 
are doomed to endless competitive empire building and warfare, whether by dictators, nation states or multi-
national corporations.  Rather, it is our evolutionary heritage and imperative to grow up as a species, to 
find our way to being a cooperative, healthy global family! 

Another book opportunity came when I was asked to write the text of a book illustrated by an exhibit of 
Earth's evolution created at Hewlett-Packard and called (like the book) <i>A Walk Through Time: from 
Stardust to Us</i>,[19] with an introductory chapter by Brian Swimme.  While the publisher -- Wiley, in New 
York -- was concerned about scientific reputation and did not permit the use of the word <i>consciousness</i> in 
describing nature, I was able to describe nature as intelligent from the get-go and to update neo-Darwinism 
to show Earth as a living entity in evolution, with an ecological systems perspective, rather than a view of 
individual species in their habitats.  

Because businesses, like other social institutions, are now suffering from having been modeled on 
mechanisms rather than living systems, and because ecosystems are ever more easily seen as wonderfully 
efficient and effective economic systems that allocate, transform, consume and recycle resources, living 
systems are of ever more interest in the business world.[20]  Thus my speaking engagements around the globe 
have included opportunities to speak to management in big businesses such as Siemens, Hewlett-Packard 
and Boeing, as well as to Brazilian businesses and MBA programs in the US and Brazil.  But I also speak to 
many other kinds of organizations suffering the same "mechanical failure," from government agencies and 
universities to the World Bank, as well as to traditional religious organizations, such as Catholic and 
Episcopalian, to newer religions, such as Unity and Religious Science, and was invited onto a science panel 
at the World Parliament of Religions in South Africa. 

Some of my most precious experiences have been when priests or nuns have actually asked me to help 
them update their theology by helping them think through new concepts of God and religion.  If those 
practicing traditional religions based on revelations can be open to scientific thinking, then perhaps science 
can follow suit and open to the deep inner knowledge to be found in religious belief and practice.  

Toward a scientific model of a living universe  

My very favorite activities are symposia of like-minded scientists and philosophers gathering to share and 
work out new scientific worldviews or paradigms.  Through these wonderful dialogues it is ever more 
obvious to me that the revolution happening in science is forcing reconsideration of its most fundamental 
assumptions, that is, of the basic beliefs supporting the current scientific model of our universe or cosmos 
and ourselves within it. 

Western science set itself the task of describing reality -- an objective world that could be studied without 
changing it.  But quantum physics and other scientific research has shown objectivity to be an illusion as 
mentioned earlier, so even our concept of reality must be called into question.  My biggest breakthrough on 
this matter came from meeting one indigenous culture after another, such as, for example, Lakota, 
Australian aboriginal and Peruvian Andean Runakuna (Quechua), that saw reality as the totality of human 
experience while recognizing there were other realities for the other living beings of the universe and wide 
differences even in human experience of the world.  Thus their world or universe models were omnicentric, 
with each sensing being at the center and the social/scientific task to find a shareable public description of 
reality for humans that respected individual deviations from it as equally real. 

This made a great deal of sense to me because of the recognition reported earlier that no one, not even any 
scientist, has ever had any experience of the world outside of his or her consciousness, and some important 
ones, such as Gregory Bateson[22] and Harvard's Nobel Laureate biologist George Wald[23] had seen 
consciousness or mind in all of biological evolution.  Thus, our scientific models of the universe must 
begin with consciousness and can only be formulated as models of human experience of the universe.  As 
western science was developed, the scientists (almost exclusively men) were so enamored of the increase in 
human power that came from the inventions of math and its translation into physical mechanism, that they 
projected these inventions onto the whole universe, with God as temporary inventor before dropping Him.  

As I worked on the requirements for an Integral Science from my own perspective, I felt a strong need to 
end the sharp distinction between physics and biology, to avoid having either one forced into the mold of 
the other.  Rather, I seek out new models of cosmic physics that are naturally compatible with seeing the 
universe as embedded living systems.  Since familiar biological life forms -- from nucleic acids to 
bodies -- take on fundamentally toroidal (vorticular) structure, which is the simplest structure meeting the 
definition of autopoiesis and is evident in proto-galactic clouds, galaxies and planetary energy configurations 
such as Earth's electromagnetic field and surface weather patterns, I gravitate toward cosmic physics models 
that begin with this elementary living geometry. 

The beauty and usefulness of autopoiesis as a definition of life lies precisely in helping us see beyond our 
narrow focus on familiar life forms to their relationship with both smaller and larger entities from 
subatomic to galactic. The simplest entities I could find that fit the definition were a whirlpool in a river, a 
tornado, a proto-galactic cloud. I reasoned that any differential gradient, whether in water, our atmosphere, 
the supernova dust cloud that gave rise to Earth or the earliest universe itself, would cause things literally to 
curl in on themselves -- to form vortices that held their form as matter/energy was pulled into and spat out 
again by them.

Having come to a vortex theory of an autopoietic living universe -- a universe of self-creating living 
geometry -- I gravitated toward physicists working with vorticular, toroidal models of macrocosm and/or 
microcosm, especially looking for models with two-way (centripetal/centrifugal) motion. It is apparent that 
more and more physicists <i>are</i> coming to see inwardly and outwardly spiraling waves as the very essence of 
cosmic creation. 

Exciting maverick physicists such as Walter Russell, Itzhak Bentov and Nassim Haramein,[24] see the 
universal processes of creation and destruction as closely coupled and mutually necessary.  In their unified 
field physics, these processes are radiation and gravity or entropy and centropy; their biological version is 
anabolism and catabolism.  In Haramein's model of black/white wholes as the fundamental nature of all 
entities in the universe at all scalar levels (what I would call holarchic levels) -- i.e. particles, atoms, cells, 
bodies, planets, stars, galaxies and the entire universe -- fluctuations in the density differentials of the 
vacuum or ZPE (zero point energy field) at the event horizons of particles change their geometries and thus 
those of their atoms in turn, giving rise to the different elements of the chemical table.  If the dynamic 
entropy/centropy balance shifts too far towards centropy, particles disappear back into the vacuum; if the 
balance shifts too far in the other direction (away from the centropy holding them together) the particles 
composing atoms become increasingly radioactive. The table of elements ends just before the dynamic 
balance is lost altogether, dissipating particles as unfettered radiation.

Cosmic objects never exist in isolation, so their internal dynamic balance must be held within the complex 
sea of wave interactions among all objects at all scalar levels. These interactions must surely affect the 
internal dynamics of any entity, either disrupting or enhancing them. The work of Wolff and of Schwarz,[25] 
as well as that of Haramein, has made this clear.

Bacteria, protists (single nucleated cell creatures), multi-celled creatures, ecosystems and the Earth itself can 
be seen as five fractal or holarchic levels of biological systems. The scalar location of all Earth's 
creatures -- from bacteria to baleen whales -- at a size level halfway between the microcosm and the 
macrocosm cannot be accidental.  Rather, it can be seen that they evolved precisely in the most complex 
possible region of entropy/centropy dynamics in the universe.  Earth's surface (or event horizon) must also 
be subject to standing waves produced by the interference patterns of colliding Earth and solar radiation, 
Earth and galactic radiation, Earth and supercluster radiation. If the vacuum energy gradients prove to be 
particularly steep at Earth's surface, where temperature, water, carbon and materials mobility provide other 
favorable conditions, toroids within toroids within toroids can curl up into complex life forms as nowhere 
else in the universe, except other planetary surfaces with similar conditions.  

This model thus holds out the possibility of a completely new approach to explaining the origin of the 
biological creatures of Earth -- to which science has, until now, restricted the category <i>life</i> (opposed to 
<i>non-life</i>).  From a physical perspective, we may be able to see planetary creatures as a special case of autopoietic 
complexity arising through the unique interaction of energy gradients in patterns of wave interference at the 
surfaces (event horizons) of planets with particular compositions and conditions determined by their 
energetic relationships with their star and universal bodies at other scalar levels. 

Cosmic autopoiesis -- the self-creation of a living universe -- thus promises to become an elegant view of 
the whole, with essentially the same production <i>and</i> recycling process at all scalar or fractal levels, and 
uniquely complex life forms generated at planetary surfaces.  Thus my explorations, unfettered by the limits 
I was taught as a scientist, brought me back to my passionate belief in science and enabled me to begin 
work on a coherent and self-consistent model of a living universe[26] that will undoubtedly keep evolving for 
the rest of my life in this particular world. 

Footnotes

1. This worldview is somewhat elaborated in the last section of this chapter and may be found as  "A 
Tentative Model of a Living Universe, Parts I and II," at  http://via-visioninaction.org  in the 
Articles section under my name.

2. Objectivity -- the presupposition that there is some kind of reality independent of individual  
perceptions--asserts that there are facts which transcend subjective reality. This concept was 
championed by theorists, such as John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Emile Durkheim and Max 
Weber, and later challenged by Polanyi, Kuhn, Feyerabend and others. 

3. Wiseman, R. & Schlitz, M. (1998) Experimenter effects and the Remote Detection of Staring, 
Journal Of Parapsychology, 61, 197-208  is a good example of such research.

4. This was scarcely acknowledged before the late 1970s and is detailed in  Lyons, Oren. et al. 1992. 
Exiled in the Land of the Free. Democracy, Indian Nations and the United States Constitution. 
Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light. 

5. See the fine book on indigenous education by Cajete, Gregory. 1994. Look to the Mountain: An 
Ecology of Indigenous Education. Durango, CO: Kivaki Press.

6. Bentov, Itzhak. 1977. Stalking the Wild Pendulum. NewYork: E.P.Dutton.

7. Barry Fell was a Harvard marine biologist who deciphered rock and tablet inscriptions, including 
the Minoan Phaistos Disk, and became an internationally acknowledged, though somewhat 
controversial, epigrapher. The book was America B.C. New York: Wallaby Books, Simon & 
Schuster. It had been given to me in late 1961 or early 1962 though it was not published until 
1976, a year after his textbook on marine biology. Fell's other books on epigraphy are Saga 
America, Times Books, and Bronze Age America, Little, Brown & Company.  

8. Lovelock, J. E. 1972. "Gaia As Seen through the Atmosphere." Atmospheric Environment  6 
(579).  This was Jim Lovelock's first journal article on Gaia, which I read in that journal at the 
AMNH well over a year before it was published. 

9. Among my favorite books by Jane Roberts are: The Nature of Personal Reality, 1974 and The 
Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, 1981, both republished in 1994 and 1995 respectibely 
by Amber-Allen: San Rafael, CA. 

10. Ray, Paul and Anderson, Sherry. 2000. The Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People are 
Changing the World. New York: Harmony Books. 

11. Lovelock and Margulis' frst books on the Gaia hypothesis were:  Lovelock, J. E. 1982. Gaia: A 
New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Margulis, L. 1982. Early Life. 
Boston: Science Books International.  More are listed in the bibliography.

12. This book was:  Lapo, A. V. 1982. Traces of Bygone Biospheres. Moscow: Mir Publishers. See 
also Vernadsky, Vladimir (1926, 1896) The Biosphere.  Published originally in 1926; reprinted 
U.S. edition 1986. Oracle, AZ: Synergistic Press. 

13. Jantsch, E. 1980. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the 
Emerging Paradigm of Evolution. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press.

14. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with 
Nature. New York: Bantam.

15. Puthoff, Harold. 1990. "Everything for Nothing." New Scientist. 28 July.

16. An account of this trek may be found under the name "Journey to Hapu" by scrolling down my 
website: http://www.ratical.org.lifeweb

17. Harman, Willis and Sahtouris, Elisabet. 1998. Biology Revisioned. Berkeley: North Atlantic 
Books.

18. Sahtouris, Elisabet. 1997.  "The Biology of Globalization," in Perspectives on Business and 
Global Change , Journal of the World Business Academy. September.

19. Sahtouris, Elisabet, with Liebes, Sid and Swimme, Brian. 1998. A Walk Through Time: From 
Stardust to Us. NY: Wiley. (Liebes is listed as first author.)

20. See, for example, Paul Hawkens' The Ecology of Commerce. 1993. New York: Harper,  and 
Kiuchi, Takashi and Shireman, Bill. 2002. What We Learned in the Rainforest. San Francisco: 
Berrett-Koehler

21. Sahtouris, Elisabet. 2000. EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution.  iUniverse.com  A complete 
copy of this book is also available free at my website: http://www.ratical.org/lifeweb

22. Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton.

23. Wald, George. 1984 Life and Mind in the Universe, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, 
Quantum Biology Symposium No.11 

24. Russell, Walter, The Universal One. 1926, 1978. The University of Science and Philosophy: 
Waynesboro, VA;  Russell, Walter, The Secret of Light. 1947,1994. The University of Science 
and Philosophy: Waynesboro, VA; Haramein, Nassim. 2002. "The Role of the Vacuum Structure 
on a Revised Bootstrap Model of the GUT Scheme." Bull. Amer. Phys. Soc. AB06, 1154; 
Haramein, Nassim. 2001. "The Scaling Equation from Micro to Macro Cosmos in Terms of 
Frequency vs. Radius _ (R)" Paper presented at the American Physics Society Meetings, Texas 
2001; Haramein, Nassim. 2002. "Fundamental Dynamics of Black Hole Physics." Bull. Amer. 
Phys. Soc. AB06, 1154;  Bentov is cited in (6) above.  

25. Wolff, Milo (2002) Origin of the Natural Laws in a Binary Universe. Technotran Press: Manhattan 
Beach, CA; Schwatrz, Gary and Linda Russek (1999) The Living Energy Universe. Hampton 
Roads: Charlottesville, VA

26. See (1) above.

________________________________

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